Today’s Eponymy in August is the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
You may also have heard this one attributed to Bertrand Russell, Charles Bukowski, or W.B. Yeats; all of these are correctly attributed. While Yeats was the first of the three to pen this principle (and was himself preceded by at very least Darwin and Confucius), Russell’s phrasing seemed to have had the most stickiness, and was repeated often with minor tweaks and rephrasings. The original phrasing, in Russell’s 1933 essay The Triumph of stupidity, is, “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
David Dunning is a professor of social psychology at Cornell. Justin Kruger is now a professor of marketing at NYU Stern. In 1999 when Kruger was completing his Ph.D. at Cornell, Dunning and Kruger published the paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This paper detailed the study into the principle suggested by Russell and attempted to back it up with study data. Over the course of four studies, the evidence was fairly clear: the median of the bottom quartile in each study (at the bottom 12%) had an average self-assessment at around 65%.
The nature of confidence in a skilled field has three major contributing cognitive biases. One is “known unknowns,” the things in a particular field that a partially trained person knows exist but is not familiar with. A person who is not well versed on the topic and has not studied it deeply will not be aware of the existence of these unknowns (making them “unknown unknowns”) and does not consider them when self-assessing competence in the field. The second contributing factor is that self-assessment is itself a metacognitive skill with its own variation of competence in the population. People with low skills in self-assessment will consistently overestimate their own competence in any field. Finally, the third contribution is that the skills required to recognize competence in a field are often the very same skills required to be competent in the field.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, then, paints a picture of almost a sine wave when charting confidence with respect to competence. The absolute beginner expects to know little to nothing about a field, while the world’s top expert knows at least enough to avoid Impostor Syndrome. But in the middle, people of low competence consistently self-assess much higher than people of higher competence. This is why, when evaluating candidates for a role, one should be wary of overconfident persons; confidence is a poor surrogate if you cannot identify competence. It backs up the glib-sounding adage, “A players hire A players. B players hire C players.”